8 ms·

I'm not sure that those lines of study were actually considered separate at the time. A century earlier than Newton's time, math and geometry were considered su

by lmkg 10y ago

I'm not sure that those lines of study were actually considered separate at the time. A century earlier than Newton's time, math and geometry were considered subfields of astronomy; and astronomy was considered the observation of the realm of the divine. Not only was there not a divide between physics and theology, people actually thought that math was a tool for studying theology (one of Copernicus' sources of income was computing astrology charts for royalty). I say this to reinforce Paul's statement, "But that's because we know how things turned out." "How things turned out" includes reclassification of what he was working out as belonging to different fields. I suspect that at the time, he didn't consider himself to be moving from one field to another but rather to trying to build upon his previous work.

abecedarius 10y ago
Yes, Newton actually wanted to include "classical scholia" in the Principia showing that he was just recovering the occult knowledge of the ancients: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C I don't know why he left them out -- I guess he knew it'd be controversial.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Nice detail!
nostrademons 10y ago
Makes you wonder what the "software industry" will look like in 300 years. Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on. I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.
- photojosh 10y ago
  Good point. I do both embedded (well) and web (so-so) dev, and they are worlds apart in almost every aspect I can think of.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    The comment above yours made me think. If the outline holds, they are about to become even more worlds apart. It's funny to think that our grand children may marvel at how workers of today could move between fields with relative ease which then will be deemed worlds apart. We may all look a bit like renaissance men to them.
- temp246810 10y ago
  Thanks for your comment. This is the kind of thoughtful comment I come here for - it's given me some ideas to go research on my own.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Quite so. What we now call natural science was all mixed together with supernatural, occult sciences. The two were separated only as a result of centuries of careful thought, plus the fact that the natural sciences made enormous progress, whereas the occult sciences just kept going around in the same circles.
technotony 10y ago
It goes even deeper than that. At the time at Cambridge there was only one subject to study, called the Tripos, which included all these things. Overtime they've gradually stripped parts of the course into their own separate subjects. The only thing left is mathematics, which leads to a curious ceremony when you graduate with a maths degree which none of the other subjects have. So to Newton Theology and Maths were taught in the same major!
- junko 10y ago
  Also worth mentioning is the old universities did not have formal assessments so 100% students graduate with certificate. While this would be a bit woolly in our hyperactive world, I think being able to study without that pressure could significantly loosen up our perceptions of what we can and cannot learn. But since the sum knowledge base acquired by the human race has grown considerably (I know, a total understatement) true polymaths will continue to be rare. But in the first place, no one should be pressured to become one. There is so much content made accessible today that 'tinkerer' IMO is an honourable occupation. It probably needs a more glamorous label though ...
hcarvalhoalves 10y ago
deGrasse's talk on science and theism has interesting remarks on when (and how) the "God in the gaps" appears on Newton's work, shows how back then natural/supernatural was mixed together. https://youtu.be/N7rR8stuQfk?t=8m44s https://youtu.be/N7rR8stuQfk?t=8m44s
balsam 10y ago
PG wants to make startups/hackers surpass earth-shattering thinkers, by considering the differences in the existential risks taken by each. Newton was betting (in PG's interpretation) that he would not go crazy or be seen as crazy. The existential risk for thinkers. Now to make scummy => crazy, where "=>" can also mean "greater or equals to".
- spraak 10y ago
  Usually I see "greater or equals to" written as >= Anyways, why shouldn't founders/hackers reach for such heights? But if I didn't know Paul Graham's background, I wouldn't assume that's what this essay infers. Rather, the essay doesn't say anything directly about startups. I'm curious what's scummy about them to you?
  - balsam 10y ago
    I had no time to write a full-fledged comment but people here took offense. Shrugs. I meant that the existential risk for founders is that of looking or being scummy. The precise, non-offensive definition of the sense of "scummy" that I intended, which unfortunately does not rhyme with "crazy", is, "profit from information asymmetry". Newton did not clearly "profit" --- though I had almost taken the 3 bets to mean the ones he placed on the South Sea --- even though he had a massive edge. (Pretty much people are arguing about scale here, in my opinion.) I do think PG wants a modern edge over Newton's methods, which concretely means pumping the applied intuitions/phronesis of the SV intellectual elite using software value capture or the VC network. By the way YC do employ heavy-duty "scum filters", e.g. the women interviewers. This is all consistent to the point of being trivial.
oskarth 10y ago
Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay. For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect (https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf#.pljhprb29 https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...), where he elaborates on the connection between risk and survival of ideas.
- pesenti 10y ago
  It is a filtering, nonsense expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for professional researchers. I for my part spent the first twenty three years of activity in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research. I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....
- whack 10y ago
  "If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent" Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.
  - rudolf0 10y ago
    Why are you using ℅ ("care of") instead of % ("percent")?
    - asavadatti 10y ago
      It's a Google Keyboard (GBoard) thing I think.
state_less 10y ago
It is also important to recognize that Newtons time had come. Newton doesn't make those discoveries 1000 years before or after. Our thoughts are placed in time, just as much as this message is in response to the timing of the authors post. In addition, It's not too infrequent that you'll find another scientist who wrote about the same thing 30 years earlier, or in Newton's case with Leibniz, concurrent. Rarely do we take a big view of the species, a creature that has been alive and thinking much longer than us, winding its way through time.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Our species?
  - state_less 10y ago
    Yep, it's a reference to homosapiens. We have been talking to each other for a while now, spreading our knowledge. It's the stories we pass on, logic, math, physics and medicine that predicated inhabiting nearly everywhere and becoming so many. We are on a higher-order mutation now, many thoughts live and die in a generation. The advantageous ones stick around (eg. Newton's). We pass them on from generation to generation. Now we are more connected, and it's moving faster. Stay cool and and enjoy the ride cousin.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      Will do
olavk 10y ago
Yeah alchemy seem like a completely different field than astronomy today, but at the time it was considered deeply connected - the metals was corresponding to the planets and so on. Because the heavenly order was considered reflected in the earthly materials and vice versa, studying one would lead you to greater understanding of the other. For a modern viewpoint it might seem like Newton was "hedging his bets" by contributing to several totally different fields, but I don't think it was seen like that at the time. It was all "philosophy". Other "philosophers" in the early modern period had similar interests. For example Tycho Brahe is remembered as an astronomer with a strong focus on empirical observation, but actually was just as focused on astrology, alchemy and medicine (which was connected to alchemy and astronomy because of the same philosophy). Newton was a "renaissance man".
- cutler 10y ago
  Ptolemy is likewise revered by astronomers as one of their founding fathers but they conveniently ignore the fact that in astrological circles he occupies a similar position due to his seminal work, the Tetrabiblos. Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view. No, they just remember people for their contributions rather than their mistakes.
    - cup 10y ago
      Pretty arrogant and ignorant statement considering some of our best scientific discoveries were mistakes.
      - emiliobumachar 10y ago
        > some of our best scientific discoveries were mistakes Could you give a few examples?

by lmkg 10y ago

abecedarius 10y ago

Yes, Newton actually wanted to include "classical scholia" in the Principia showing that he was just recovering the occult knowledge of the ancients: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C I don't know why he left them out -- I guess he knew it'd be controversial.

jacobush 10y ago
Nice detail!

nostrademons 10y ago

Makes you wonder what the "software industry" will look like in 300 years. Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on. I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.

photojosh 10y ago
Good point. I do both embedded (well) and web (so-so) dev, and they are worlds apart in almost every aspect I can think of.
- jacobush 10y ago
  The comment above yours made me think. If the outline holds, they are about to become even more worlds apart. It's funny to think that our grand children may marvel at how workers of today could move between fields with relative ease which then will be deemed worlds apart. We may all look a bit like renaissance men to them.
temp246810 10y ago
Thanks for your comment. This is the kind of thoughtful comment I come here for - it's given me some ideas to go research on my own.

woodandsteel 10y ago

Quite so. What we now call natural science was all mixed together with supernatural, occult sciences. The two were separated only as a result of centuries of careful thought, plus the fact that the natural sciences made enormous progress, whereas the occult sciences just kept going around in the same circles.

technotony 10y ago

It goes even deeper than that. At the time at Cambridge there was only one subject to study, called the Tripos, which included all these things. Overtime they've gradually stripped parts of the course into their own separate subjects. The only thing left is mathematics, which leads to a curious ceremony when you graduate with a maths degree which none of the other subjects have. So to Newton Theology and Maths were taught in the same major!

junko 10y ago
Also worth mentioning is the old universities did not have formal assessments so 100% students graduate with certificate. While this would be a bit woolly in our hyperactive world, I think being able to study without that pressure could significantly loosen up our perceptions of what we can and cannot learn. But since the sum knowledge base acquired by the human race has grown considerably (I know, a total understatement) true polymaths will continue to be rare. But in the first place, no one should be pressured to become one. There is so much content made accessible today that 'tinkerer' IMO is an honourable occupation. It probably needs a more glamorous label though ...

hcarvalhoalves 10y ago

deGrasse's talk on science and theism has interesting remarks on when (and how) the "God in the gaps" appears on Newton's work, shows how back then natural/supernatural was mixed together. https://youtu.be/N7rR8stuQfk?t=8m44s https://youtu.be/N7rR8stuQfk?t=8m44s

balsam 10y ago

PG wants to make startups/hackers surpass earth-shattering thinkers, by considering the differences in the existential risks taken by each. Newton was betting (in PG's interpretation) that he would not go crazy or be seen as crazy. The existential risk for thinkers. Now to make scummy => crazy, where "=>" can also mean "greater or equals to".

spraak 10y ago
Usually I see "greater or equals to" written as >= Anyways, why shouldn't founders/hackers reach for such heights? But if I didn't know Paul Graham's background, I wouldn't assume that's what this essay infers. Rather, the essay doesn't say anything directly about startups. I'm curious what's scummy about them to you?
- balsam 10y ago
  I had no time to write a full-fledged comment but people here took offense. Shrugs. I meant that the existential risk for founders is that of looking or being scummy. The precise, non-offensive definition of the sense of "scummy" that I intended, which unfortunately does not rhyme with "crazy", is, "profit from information asymmetry". Newton did not clearly "profit" --- though I had almost taken the 3 bets to mean the ones he placed on the South Sea --- even though he had a massive edge. (Pretty much people are arguing about scale here, in my opinion.) I do think PG wants a modern edge over Newton's methods, which concretely means pumping the applied intuitions/phronesis of the SV intellectual elite using software value capture or the VC network. By the way YC do employ heavy-duty "scum filters", e.g. the women interviewers. This is all consistent to the point of being trivial.

oskarth 10y ago

Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay. For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect (https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf#.pljhprb29 https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...), where he elaborates on the connection between risk and survival of ideas.

pesenti 10y ago
It is a filtering, nonsense expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for professional researchers. I for my part spent the first twenty three years of activity in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research. I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....
whack 10y ago
"If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent" Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.
- rudolf0 10y ago
  Why are you using ℅ ("care of") instead of % ("percent")?
  - asavadatti 10y ago
    It's a Google Keyboard (GBoard) thing I think.

state_less 10y ago

It is also important to recognize that Newtons time had come. Newton doesn't make those discoveries 1000 years before or after. Our thoughts are placed in time, just as much as this message is in response to the timing of the authors post. In addition, It's not too infrequent that you'll find another scientist who wrote about the same thing 30 years earlier, or in Newton's case with Leibniz, concurrent. Rarely do we take a big view of the species, a creature that has been alive and thinking much longer than us, winding its way through time.

jacobush 10y ago
Our species?
- state_less 10y ago
  Yep, it's a reference to homosapiens. We have been talking to each other for a while now, spreading our knowledge. It's the stories we pass on, logic, math, physics and medicine that predicated inhabiting nearly everywhere and becoming so many. We are on a higher-order mutation now, many thoughts live and die in a generation. The advantageous ones stick around (eg. Newton's). We pass them on from generation to generation. Now we are more connected, and it's moving faster. Stay cool and and enjoy the ride cousin.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Will do

olavk 10y ago

Yeah alchemy seem like a completely different field than astronomy today, but at the time it was considered deeply connected - the metals was corresponding to the planets and so on. Because the heavenly order was considered reflected in the earthly materials and vice versa, studying one would lead you to greater understanding of the other. For a modern viewpoint it might seem like Newton was "hedging his bets" by contributing to several totally different fields, but I don't think it was seen like that at the time. It was all "philosophy". Other "philosophers" in the early modern period had similar interests. For example Tycho Brahe is remembered as an astronomer with a strong focus on empirical observation, but actually was just as focused on astrology, alchemy and medicine (which was connected to alchemy and astronomy because of the same philosophy). Newton was a "renaissance man".

cutler 10y ago
Ptolemy is likewise revered by astronomers as one of their founding fathers but they conveniently ignore the fact that in astrological circles he occupies a similar position due to his seminal work, the Tetrabiblos. Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view. No, they just remember people for their contributions rather than their mistakes.
  - cup 10y ago
    Pretty arrogant and ignorant statement considering some of our best scientific discoveries were mistakes.
    - emiliobumachar 10y ago
      > some of our best scientific discoveries were mistakes Could you give a few examples?